I wish I could be flattered that my book "Flask by Example" appears above the seminal "Two Scoops of Django" in the "Web Development" section[0], but instead I'm just left wondering how "Popularity Score" is calculated. We're only given:<p>"The scores are based on a combination of the popularity of the book and relevance to the topic. The best possible score is 100 and the worst is 0."<p>[0] <a href="http://pythonbooks.org/topical-books/web-development/" rel="nofollow">http://pythonbooks.org/topical-books/web-development/</a>
I created PythonBooks as a side project.<p>The website is a guided repository of Python books and currently lists the best 100 books. It classifies these books into fine grained categories and shows the best books in each category. It has filters for Python version, free and non free books etc. For the beginner book section, you can even filter the books by topics that you want to learn.
The site states:<p>"The Bestseller Rank was chosen as the popularity scale. The Bestseller Rank loosely indicates how many copies of the book were bought recently on Amazon. This turns out to be well correlated with quality."<p>Why should popularity automatically equate to quality? Here are a couple of examples where this is not true. For instance if I search by "algorithm and data structure."<p>I see "Data Structure and Algorithmic Thinking with Python: Data Structure and Algorithmic Puzzles "by by Narasimha Karumanchi ranked above "Data Structures and Algorithms in Python" by Michael T. Goodrich. The book by Narasimha Karumanchi is absolutely terrible, it's filled with typos, plagiarisms, poor English and code that simply doesn't work.<p>So why is it ranked higher? Probably because the Michael T. Goodrich book is an expensive(but quality)text book while the Narasimha Karumanchi book is just plain cheap. Even look at the user reviews on Amazon for Karumanchi book, its an abomination.<p>Also there are a number Packt Publishing titles on here. Looking at these rankings you might believe that one of their books is 3rd most popular or 4th most popular so they must be of decent quality.<p>However Packt Publishing are generally not very good quality publications, they are often not spell-checked, have grammatical errors and often do little more than paraphrase existing documentation. They just crank out titles with little regard for quality - 'make 'em cheap and lots of them.'<p>If I search by "Intermediate" books. I see a Packt Publishing title ranked above the "Powerful Python: The Most Impactful Patterns, Features, and Development Strategies Modern Python Provides"by Aaron Maxwell which is an excellent book.<p>Why is it not as popular? Possibly because the author also sold the book DRM-free on their own website?
The excellent "Two Scoops of Django" is now on version 1.11.<p><a href="https://www.twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-11" rel="nofollow">https://www.twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django...</a>
Very few of:<p><a href="http://pythonbooks.org/for-experienced-programmers-new-to-python/" rel="nofollow">http://pythonbooks.org/for-experienced-programmers-new-to-py...</a><p>Are for experienced programmers new to Python, which is a shame.